Inherit the Wind: Evolution is an Illusion

It’s Where They Wanted To Go

In the original Star Trek pilot entitled “The Cage,” the Enterprise receives a distress signal from a long lost exploration vessel. The signal was transmitted 20 years ago, and the Enterprise responds hoping to find survivors. The landing party arrives at the planet’s surface and, indeed, they find elderly crew members who have carved out a living for themselves on the distant planet. It is a futuristic version of “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but there’s just one problem: It is all an illusion.

The planet has an advanced civilization living underground. They produced an illusion that was exactly what Captain Pike wanted to see. The elderly crew, happily and resourcefully making a life for themselves was exactly what everyone was hoping for (click now on video).

It is the same with evolution’s poster child, Inherit the Wind. Whereas Arthur Miller was worried critics would think he was skewing history for a mere partisan purpose with his brilliant play, The Crucible, [1] Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee had no such compunction in writing their blatantly false, two-dimensional cartoon version of the 1925 Monkey Trial.

When Miller travelled to Salem he uncovered something profound. The Witch Trial records were eerily parallel to the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1940s. His task was not to contrive a silly fiction, but to reveal a dangerous, and all too real, stain within humanity. False accusations, smears, character assassination, black-balling, secret lists, group-think, and cowardice. It was all there.

Unlike The Crucible, Inherit the Wind fails to uncover in Dayton, Tennessee, an underlying theme or connection to McCarthyism. So Lawrence and Lee did something Miller never did—they constructed a false illusion.

John Scopes becomes a humble and tireless science teacher hauled off to jail by an angry mob of fundamentalists, led by a vitriolic Reverend Jeremiah Brown, for trying to enlighten his science students. In fear for his life he contacts journalist Henry Louis Mencken for help in securing a lawyer. The townspeople march in protest, singing hymns, and the William Jennings Bryan character—a loudmouth glutton—is slayed by the Clarence Darrow protagonist. None of this ever happened.

This is the mythological Warfare Thesis set to script. Inherit the Wind is an enduring and durable tale not because it uncovers an important truth but because it plays to humanity’s weakest tendencies. The script presents a false reality. It is a mythical tale using the 1925 Monkey Trial to gain an aura of realism.

As NT Wright said of Darwin, the reason why Inherit the Wind gets the mileage that it does is because that is where people wanted to go.

As with “The Cage,” the illusion is what people want to believe. Just as the alien civilization produced an illusion that was precisely what Captain Pike would want to see, Inherit the Wind is precisely the Warfare Thesis illusion that evolutionists want to see. Flyover country is full of dangerous, anti-intellectual, fundamentalists who need to be set straight by the likes of Spencer Tracy.

Inherit the Wind, and the broader Warfare Thesis myth, have fueled precisely what Miller helped to expose. Inherit the Wind claims to oppose the dangerous, anti-intellectual, fundamentalism, but, in fact, it reinforced it. Instead of labelling people as communists, they are now labelled as anti-science. Otherwise the scene remains complete with the usual false accusations, character smears, black-balling, secret lists, group-think, and cowardice. It’s all still there.

Evolutionists are the dangerous, anti-intellectual, fundamentalists. The American Bar Association absurdly rates Inherit the Wind as one of the top legal movies of all time.

And the ABA is not simply a lone nut. Legal expert Andrew Cohen not only gave high praise to Inherit the Wind, but ridiculously called it “one of the great trial movies of all time.”

Judge John Jones—exalted as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year—unbelievably revealed that he actually wanted to see Inherit the Wind a second time in preparation for the 2005 Dover case, over which he presided, because, after all, the film puts the origins debate into its proper “historical context.”

Proper historical context? You’ve got to be kidding.

What a classic mistrial. Jones had been so indoctrinated by the Warfare Thesis that he actually believed the evolutionary propaganda to be historically accurate. If the perfect crime is the one that is never discovered, the perfect propaganda is the one that is never understood. Jones later reminisced about the trial, unbelievably explaining that “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind.”  Jones was not educated, he was brainwashed.

It’s where they wanted to go.

1. Arthur Miller, “Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible’,” The New Yorker, Oct 21, 1996.